The entries for September 30, 1804 capture a single sequence of events — a lone Indian overtaking the boat, a riverside encounter with roughly two hundred Tetons, and a near-accident under sail that frightened the Teton chief traveling with the party — but the four narrators differ markedly in scope, register, and the details they choose to preserve. Read together, the accounts reveal both the collaborative shape of the expedition’s record-keeping and the distinct voices behind it.
Refusal on the Water
All four journalists open with the same incident: an Indian running along the bank to overtake the keelboat. Clark’s narrative is the most diplomatically detailed, noting that the man “requstd to go with us to the Ricaras, we refused to take him,” and that he soon discerned “at a great Distanc a great number of men women & Children decending a hill towards the river.” Gass compresses the same moment into a sentence — “the chief we had on board spoke to him” — and Whitehouse omits the runner entirely, beginning instead with the larger band already visible on the south side.
Ordway, characteristically, supplies the diplomatic substance Gass and Whitehouse leave out. He records the runner’s actual message:
he told us that the other band was comming on, and wished us to Stop, we told him we could not Stop neither did we wish to see them
This blunt refusal, echoed in Clark’s parallel phrasing about being “badly treated” by the band below, suggests Ordway either drew on Clark’s notes or shared the captains’ framing of the encounter. The verbal overlap between Ordway and Clark — both reference the appeal to “Mr. Durion” (Pierre Dorion) for a fuller explanation, both describe the carrot of tobacco sent to each chief, both note the party proceeding under sail — is consistent with the broader pattern in which Ordway’s sergeant’s journal tracks the captains’ record closely while Gass and Whitehouse work at greater remove.
The Parley and the Flags
Ordway alone preserves a striking detail of signal exchange that is absent from Clark, Gass, and Whitehouse:
the Indians assembled on S. Shore [and] hoisted a white flag, we then took down our red flag, directly after they hoisted another. We then took them to be our friends
This is the kind of observed protocol — a reciprocal lowering and raising of colors — that the captains’ journals, focused on policy and geography, tend to flatten into general statements of friendliness. Ordway also records the issuance of a dram of whiskey to each man (“our officers Gave Each man of the party a draghm”), which Clark notes in passing as a move to “refresh the party with whiskey.” Gass, by contrast, telescopes the entire parley into a single clause: “we halted and spoke to them and then went on under a fine breeze of wind.”
Whitehouse’s entry is the briefest of the four and reads almost as a digest of Gass: both men describe giving the Indians “Some tobacco,” speaking briefly, and proceeding “under a fine breeze of wind.” The phrasing is close enough to suggest the enlisted men’s journals were either compared in camp or drew on a shared oral summary at day’s end.
A Medicine Boat in the Wind
The day’s most vivid moment — the keelboat swinging broadside in a hard east wind, terrifying the Teton chief on board — appears in all four journals, but the explanations diverge. Gass records simply that “the waves ran very high and the boat rocked a great deal, which so alarmed our old chief, that he would not go any further.” Clark, more circumstantially, writes that “the boat turned by accident & was nearly filling and rocked verry much, allarmed the Indian Chief on board who ran and hid himself.”
Ordway provides the mechanical cause Clark omits: the stern got fast on shore while taking on firewood, “She Swang round in the Stream the wind being So hard from E. that [it] caused the waves to run high the Boat got in the trough.” He also records the chief’s interpretation in a phrase the others do not preserve:
he Said he thought our Boat was a medicine & he would go no further with us
The word “medicine” — denoting supernatural power — is the kind of cross-cultural detail Ordway tends to catch and the captains tend to soften. Clark notes only that the chief “express a wish to return.” All four agree on the parting gifts: a blanket, tobacco, a knife. The shared inventory, recorded with near-identical vocabulary, marks one of the day’s clearest points of cross-narrator convergence, even as the surrounding emphases — diplomatic, mechanical, ethnographic, or merely meteorological — distinguish each writer’s hand.
